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Echo Chamber Workshop

This summer a PHD art program (<a href="http://www.transart.org/transartfest/events/"><strong>Trans Art Institute</strong></a>) that often spends its summer in Berlin has asked me to put together and teach a workshop of my own choosing.
It seems appropriate to me for us all to be asking ourselves many complicated and difficult questions about the state of ,our own as well as in general, ART PRACTICE today.
Towards this end I have created a temporary blog with five posts to lead us towards the necessary conversations.
<a href="http://theechochamberworkshop.blogspot.de/2013/07/new-economics-101.html">Link to <strong>POST 1</strong></a>.The new global context in which we engage in practice today
<a href="http://theechochamberworkshop.blogspot.de/2013/07/artworld-interviews.html">Link to <strong>POST 2</strong></a>. The local context of markets (in art)
<a href="http://theechochamberworkshop.blogspot.de/2013/07/copy-culture.html">Link to <strong>POST 3</strong></a>. The well established echo-chamber in the art economies today. Cloning and copy culture
<a href="http://theechochamberworkshop.blogspot.de/2013/07/artist-k-wiley.html">Link to <strong>POST 4</strong></a>. Case Study: Kihinde Wiley, artist.
<a href="http://theechochamberworkshop.blogspot.de/2013/07/iartist.html">Link to <strong>POST 5</strong></a>. iARTIST first person singular

Like Pablo Picasso's epic Guernica painting (commissioned for the 1937 World Fair in Paris) the art-world is no longer as it was even a decade and a half ago. <strong>In the aftermath of unspoken art-bubbles and the international financial crisis, the disasters must be revealed, discussed and the relevance of artistic practice must be understood.</strong>

This image serves as an apt metaphor for the necessary granular analysis necessary today, individually and in community.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
<strong>UPDATE:</strong>
The workshop went very well- the day began with 4 <em>PechaKucha</em> styled presentations by myself and 3 additional teachers/workshop teams.
My class had approximately a dozen participants and it encompassed the whole day plus some extra. We reviewed five questions that were distributed prior to the workshop as well as looking closely at the five posts from the blog links noted above.
The questions and the topics that arose were extremely challenging for everyone and yet we all knew that they must be taken seriously. I proposed that there is sufficient collective wisdom that lies between us here in todays workshop. Many of the sources and current perceptions of the artworld today were new or vaguely familiar to this rather motivated group of artists who were ambitiously committed to moving forward with their practices. Some of the asigned tasks were very challenging for them when I requested a minimum or less of using tecnical devices such as computers as a crutch to speaking about ones own work- something almost every artist has difficulty articulating perfectly. I requested simple A4 printouts for scotch-tape pinups presented in the elevator-pitch format with a bit more generosity of time than a pecha kucha presentation without the glamor of powerpoint.
We watched an astoundingly puzzling video recently created by/for the hiphop star JayZ as a semi-homage to <strong>Marina Abramovic</strong> , currently the most prominent Performance Art impresario alive today, entitled <em>Picasso Baby.</em>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87">wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovic</a>
<strong>Buzzworthy</strong> article on <em>Picasso Baby</em> <a href="http://buzzworthy.mtv.com/2013/08/05/jay-z-picasso-baby-video/">HERE</a>
After the success of the days hard work among all the participants i think one more post will be forth coming and necessary to start to round out some other examples of the state of affairs in the art world today.
I will continue on as an adviser for <em>Trans Art Institute</em> through next year and we'll see what their interest will be for re-staging the workshop course next year, with modifications since the topic it covers continues to morph.